How to Unlock Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic resource for any website owner. From small hobby sites to government organizations, Google Analytics is a goldmine of useful information about visitor trends and behavior.

However, there is one area where Google Analytics frustrates its users: the organic search terms report. An increasing number of results in this part of Analytics are listed as ‘not provided’ – not much use when you’re trying to find out what people are searching for.

Note: the ‘not provided’ is lifted for paid search results. It’s just the organic search results that are often hidden from view.

Why Is Data Hidden and ‘Not Provided’?

If a user is logged into a Google product (such as Gmail or any Google Account) when searching, their search is conducted over SSL. As such, the referral data relating to that search is hidden.

Referral data includes some useful information such as the keywords used to perform that search. Google can still see this information, but website owners – and Analytics account holders – can’t access it.

This missing data leaves a gaping hole in our analytics reports, making it difficult for us to know the ROI of specific keywords we rank for in organic search.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds that can reveal the data behind these figures.

How to Unlock ‘Not Provided’ Results

Before we get into this guide, it’s a good idea to verify just how many of your organic search keywords are listed as ‘not provided’, and whether this is increasing . You’ll need to assess whether it’s worth investing time into decoding these results before you proceed, since none of these techniques provides a single, foolproof solution.

Method 1: Understand the User’s Behavior With Landing Page Reports

The first way to get around the ‘not provided’ result is to mine Google Analytics for other information that will reveal more about those visitors and what they were doing on your site.

Click the name of the profile you want to work with, and select the Filters tab.

Create a new filter in your Analytics account:

The purpose of this filter is to extract the ‘not provided’ terms. To do this, extract the URL and rewrite the two in place of the original ‘not provided’ text. Although this doesn’t reveal the exact keyword, it can help you to understand where that traffic is going and whether you need to dig deeper with other techniques. (The important part – the rewrite – is highlighted in red in our screenshot.)

Note that this filter can’t be applied to historical data; you’ll only see it in action for new visits.

Method 2: Use Traffic Sources Data

Within Google Analytics, there’s a second set of metrics that can help you to decipher your most popular keywords. The Search Engine Optimization report is designed specifically for this purpose – specifically the Queries report.

Data in this report is two days out of date, and it’s fair to say that the metrics here are limited in scope. If you’re managing a busy website, Traffic Sources simply won’t give you the detail you need to properly analyze your queries and landing pages; the number of results it can show is limited, for example.

However, for smaller sites, this report is worth a look for a very basic overview of what’s happening with organic search on your site.

Method 3: Examine AdWords Data

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, ‘not provided’ is only an issue for organic search queries. Paid search isn’t affected. That means you can circumvent the problems caused by ‘not provided’ results by paying for Adwords and measuring the response rates to keywords via PPC. These are shown in Google Analytics as Matched Search Queries.

Note that, again, this isn’t an entirely accurate solution; the data shown in Adwords is only related to traffic that you’ve paid for – not the organic traffic. However, if you have the cash to spend on keyword research, it’s another way to boost your understanding of user behavior and make your SEO research more meaningful.

Method 4: Use Webmaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools dashboard is nowhere near as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but in this situation, the metrics it gathers does add some value. Specifically, you can see a very basic overview of keywords that lead visitors to your site in the Traffic menu, under Search Queries.

A nice treat that Google Webmaster Tools does give you: It will tell you the clickthrough-rate of your keywords from Google Search. Sometimes a little more polishing up on your title tags and meta-descriptions can help increase the clickthrough-rate of these keywords.

Finally, Google Webmaster Tools also tells you an approximate amount of search impressions your keywords are attracting. If you know that a certain keyword is attracting a large number of impressions, it might be in your best interest to put a little more effort towards ranking for that keyword to obtain more traffic. One way to do this is to simply expand your content related to this keyword.

Conclusion

Google’s ‘not provided’ data is a controversial topic, and there’s no failsafe way to access the data. However, if you’re losing a significant amount of statistical data to ‘not provided’, it’s certainly worth investing some time to overcome the problem. Implementing one or more workarounds may help you to improve your understanding of organic keywords and get a better insight into your missing statistics.

Where Google Analytics Falls Short

This is a winner! I am often frustrated with the “not provided” results for the keywords in my Google Analytics, so this is definitely worth saving and adjusting to see what actually comes up. I often try to freshen up my content using keyword rich words pertinent to my business, but again, the content needs to be relatable to the average reader.

My blog was over 60% (not provided) in January and is clearly trending a point, maybe two, higher than that already in February. I moved to using Webmaster tools and the search query reports in GA a while ago and have only somewhat jokingly said that Bing/Yahoo is very close to providing as much data on search as Google.

Thanks for the article! Will try out everything. Just yesterday I had checked this “feature” and my website was also at about 60%. How are we supposed to improve our SEO when Google doesn’t deliver the search keywords? This can’t be in their interest. Or do they want to push everyone to use Adwords?

Thanks for your comments Beatrix. The amount of ‘Not Provided’ data in my Analytics account is also steadily increasing. Google’s unlikely to change its methods, so it’s up to us to try work around them.

This was a killer post. I was never even thought before on how to unlock “not provided” keywords in google analytics probably because of lack of time. But post opened my eyes and will definitely try to find some and see what is going to proceed.

Great post! I’ve been using a combination of GWT data, with the landing page for the “not provided” associated with de other keywords available in organic kws reports. So this way we can know which keywords to focus in optimize.

I’ve checked my GA stats and approx 40% of all our organic search traffic that converts into an enquiry is (not provided) whereas only about 25% of unconverting organic traffic is (not provided). Is anyone else seeing an increased conversion rate among people who are logged into their account?

Well this is awesome! I’ve seen too many of these “not provided” results to care much for it now, but the capability to at least shed some light as to what they actually were. Will be checking this out.

A good recap of all the possible workarounds to try to deal with not provided effect….
But don’t forget that in our e-marketing world, It is important to hold promise…it is not the case regarding the title of this article (unlock….not really…).

The nature of Analytics makes it difficult to decipher all of the data within without paying for it. This article should at least give you some workarounds to reclaim some of that information! I hope you found it useful.

Google Analytic shows approx 30-40% of my keywords as “not provided”.I’ve been looking out for a solution how to uncover them all. After reading to your post i think now i’ll be able to get some idea about them.

Thank you so much! When I was searching “not provided google analytics”, this came up the first. Very helpful, especially the last one about Webmaster Tools. I already had it, but never knew how to read it. Now it’s making much sense.

Very helpful tutorials, I tried the method 2 of Google Analytics as I think that gives most accurate results. I am amazed to know there are some pages on my website that are quite popular on google. Thank You

This article was great. I made some changes in my account according to this article as I’ve been missing those “not provided” keywords. Pretty important to be able to view what people are typing in search engines when they find you. Thanks

hii Carl, thanks for this informative blog and i really appreciate that you have replied all of your comments..i just wanna ask two thing form you that you have given “Filter” option in your blog
1st tel me about three fields like what is ‘(.*)’ & ‘np-$B1’?
2nd after save filter how can we check the result

I wanna know the answer to this. Do we just copy the exact wording that you show in your article? The term “rewrite” was confusing so I’m not sure if we’re supposed to copy it word for word like you had it, or “rewrite” our own stuff in those fields. Please help! Then how will we know if it worked or not??

Please see Dan Barker’s original post. It’s difficult for me to include all of his guidance, since I had various methods to write about in one article.
econsultancy.com/blog/8342-how-to-steal-some-not-provided-data-back-from-google

This is brilliant – in Google Analytics I’m starting to find a greater percentage of (not provided) results than ever before – and while this doesn’t exactly solve the issue it helps to be able to dig deeper and see the landing pages these visitors are heading to – not something I had previously considered.

Keyword ‘Not provided’ is one of the mind-boggling issue in Google Analytics. More than 50% traffic on my blog is from ‘not provided’ keyword. It has been difficult to track where the traffic was from. Thanks for this guide.

“To do this, extract the URL and rewrite the two in place of the original ‘not provided’ text.”

I encountered this sentence and lost completely the meaning. I cannot imagine what this sentence even means. What URL? What does rewrite the two? Which two? Which not provided text? I could ask about 10 questions about this sentence.

Thanks a lot. It was a problem and a mistery for us. We’ve started working on your methods and they are being very useful. It is really one of the most important factors to get your web business successful.

The right keywords are essential in everyone’s success. It is valid for mobile marketing and for call to action, to choose the right mobile keywords. It is similar to search keywords planning for any business’ SEO

I believe that none of these techniques if fixing the problem completely. I’ve tried with the first method and all I got are the pages which have entrances for not provided keywords. So basically, with that method, I can only see where, the “not provided” traffic is entering and nothing else.
But anyway, this is a good place to start until someone or some software find the best way to unlock the not provided keywords.

Both analytics and webmaster tools has stopped reporting data from several really high search query from which we’re getting tons of traffic. Real-time analytics reports people on our site with those queries (they go to a particular landing page) but they don’t show up in the historial data (they used to). Stopped around a week ago.

Yes thank you so much for the article. I have been having problem tracking not provided keywords. This post help me bit with that but it is not perfect solution as you know. Having np – url is good instead of not provide but I hope there will be other tricks to reveal exact keywords behind NP.

Thanks! This has been driving me crazy and I’m glad I finally googled it to try and figure it out! (my search term: google analytics keyword not provided in case it came up “not provided lol lol) THANKS AGAIN!

I don’t understand why it is so hard to get this information in one place. I pull reports from everywhere and it is so annoying all the sites I need to go to each time I want to analyze my website data.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful experience and thoughts. I was not familiar with Method number1. May someone give us a chance to sort out this controversial and dictatorial behavior about “not provided” issue.

Not provided data is important to the SEO side, today your suggestions, a good interpretation of the q(uery) parameter and a strong SEO analysis can make us discover the 99% of the keywords not provided in google analytics.

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